THE GOD OF PEACE-WHAT HE WILL DO IN US.
Hebrews 13: 20-21 The God of peace. . . . Make you perfect in every good thing to do His will, working in us that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ; to whom be the glory for ever and ever. Amen.
Now in the finial portion of the SECOND HALF-PRACTICAL.
HEBREWS Chapters 10:19 - 13:25
Of a Life in the Power of the Great Salvation.
Continuing on in the TWELFTH SECTION
Hebrews 13:1-25
Love and Good Works.
BY THE REV. ANDREW MURRAY
In our last meditation we saw what the link is between the two verses of this wonderful benediction. All that God has done in our redemption through Christ is for the sake of what He wishes to effect in our heart through our salvation. All that He makes Known to us of that redemption is to bring us to trust and believe and to the yielding of ourselves to Him,--- to work out in the inner man, the subjective redemption in the same Authority and power in which the objective, the Heavenly Redemption, has been effected. The Father longs to have back again the man He lost in paradise, His image and likeness restored within us. All that Christ has done on earth and in Heaven, even to His sitting at His right hand, cannot satisfy the heart of God until He sees the Kingdom set up within our heart. There the true Authority and power and glory of the Son are to be manifested.
The God of Peace make you perfect in every good thing to do His Will. To do His Will. This, then, is the object of all that God has done. That the Son, who is God, should be our Redeemer; that the stupendous miracles of the incarnation and the atonement, the resurrection and the seating of a man on the Throne of God, should be wrought, that the Holy Spirit of God should be given out from Heaven,--- all was with one view, that we should be brought to do the Will of God. The whole relation between God and the creature depends on this one thing: without it there can be no true fellowship with God. It was for this Jesus became man: Lo, I come to do Your Will O God. It was through this He Redeemed us. It is to make us partakers of the Authority and power to do this, that, as Mediator of the New Covenant, He puts the New Law in our heart, that we may do the Will of God on earth as in Heaven. It is for this alone He Lives in Heaven: the only proof and measure of the success of His work is that we do the Will of God. Without this, all His work and ours is but vain.
Now the God of Peace make you perfect in every good work to do His Will. The doing of God's will depends entirely upon God's fitting us for it. As truly as God Himself perfected Christ and wrought out the Redemption in Him, God must perfect us to do His Will also. As surely as He did the first, He will do the second. The word "perfect" used here means, to put into the right position or condition, to readjust, to equip, to fit a thing perfectly for its purpose. The prayer, "God make you perfect in every good thing," teaches that the work of God is not only a general enabling or endowing with power, leaving to us its use and application, but that He must perfect us in each one of the good things we have to do; so alone can we do His Will. It calls us to an absolute dependency upon the Father, as Jesus meant, when He said, "The Son can do nothing of Himself." It seeks to bring us to a helplessness and a humility that just yields itself to God for every moment, and counts upon Him, even as He wrought out the Great Salvation in Christ as a whole, to work it in us in each minutest particular. With God nothing is small or insignificant. He must be in things, little as great, the All in All. For us to appropriate our God-given promises we have to acquired Gods given faith, it is through these God-given promises that become as living in us, as it is God who teaches us there meaning and purpose.
Working in you that which is pleasing in His sight, through Jesus Christ. Here we have the explanation of how He perfects in us every good thing: He works in us through Christ Jesus. The three persons of the Godhead are indivisibly and inseparably one. The Father works through the Son and the Holy Spirit. When Jesus Christ, our High Priest- King, ascended the Throne, He sent from the Father the Holy Spirit to be within us, the power and Life of His redemption in Heaven. Then the ministration of the Spirit, of the inner life, began upon earth--- God working in men what is pleasing in His sight, through Christ Jesus dwelling in our heart. Then the fruit of Christ's work was made manifest; men on earth in very deed doing the Will of God, and working what was pleasing in His sight, because He Himself worked it in them, through Christ Jesus.
Let this parting prayer teach us a double lesson. It is a promise of what God will do. He will perfect us--- put us in the right position, and give us the right condition of heart--- in every good thing, to do His Will,--- He Himself working in us that which is well-pleasing in His sight, through Christ Jesus. Let us read the words until we Know in Truth what God is wanting and waiting to do. The prayer becomes then a call to us to prayer and trusting. Let us fix our hearts in trusting expectancy (with eagerness and great excitement) on God and what He has wrought through Christ for us. Let us fix them in trusting His faithfulness on what He Wills to do in us through Christ, as surely and as mightily. All that God has done in Christ is only a beginning, a promise, a pledge of what He Wills to do in us. Let that trust stir our desire to Rest content with nothing less than the actual experience of the Truth of this prayer- promise. Let that trust begin in prayer to claim and embrace and own it as our very own, waiting in deep anxiousness of receptivity and total dependency and humility on God to do it. And let every thought of the teaching of the Hebrews just culminate in a blessed act of adoring surrender. O You, God of Peace! here I am, Do Your Will as I depend on You to do it.
1. God working in us. Look upward in wonder and worship. Turn inward in stillness and meekness of heart, taking time to yield to the Spirit's working. And regard your heart as indeed the sphere of the working of the Living God.
2. Pray, pray, pray! Is the blessing of this Epistle, the power of redemption, must come from above. It comes certainly to the heart open towards God and thirsting and hungering for more of Him.
3. Make you perfect: fit you perfectly to be subject to Him, and in dependency and humility and faith to work what He works in you. It is often a misapprehension or a difficulty that hinders. God can restore you in one moment to the right relation or position.
4. A road is only good for that to which it brings as its end. The whole gospel is nothing but a way to this end God finding His place in our heart to dwell and work there that which is pleasing in His sight, so that we do His Will.
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